Thursday, April 16, 2009

Carbunkle 3 - Bob's take and zip out - building up energy

If I had sent these layouts to a typical overseas studio, they would have come back with no emphasis or punch. Instead this was animated by Bob Jaques, who used some unique ways to punctuate key actions and make them stick.

From this layout pose above, Ren has to let go of his tongue so it will flop back into his mouth.Bob animates it in a designy wave pattern and times it so it starts almost even, but then snaps into his head.Wham! You really feel the impact of the tongue driving all the way back into Ren's skull.Here's another thing Bob excels at. He can take a pose, and build up a ton of energy into it, before letting it loose into the next pose.This is the basic layout pose above, but if you still frame through the clip, you can see that not every part of Ren makes it to this pose at the same time. There is also some very subtle overlap and tight inbetweens. All this adds up to tremendous built up energy.Then Ren just pops off screen and there are no drawings of him. The contrast between the built up energy and him disappearing in the other direction gives the illusion that we saw him exit the stage. The smoke dissipating adds to the illusion.Stimpy needs to look to the right after Ren, so Bob goes past the layout key ...and then pops back into it, thus giving it an accent and helping draw attention to this tiny move that might otherwise be missed.

It's not in this scene, but a background touch that flew past me a million times before it hit me was the appearance of George Jetson's head on a dog's body behind the little girl as Ren is stopping her in her tracks near the end of the cartoon.

Oh yes, and like I badgered a few posts ago, PLEEEZE tell us about the mysterious 3-D scene!

The "take" is awesome. I love the contrast and rhythm between the size of the eyes/tongue and feet. He really produced a lot of energy having Ren's torso bend when Ren was raising his foot as he was about to race off.